Red Guards

The Red Guards were a student mass paramilitary soical movement mobilized by Mao Zedong in 1966 and 1967 during the Cultural Revolution.

The Red Guards were initially formed in 1966 as an ultra-leftist student movement, and they lacked legitimacy (being branded as "counter-revolutionaries" by their school) until Mao ordered that their manifesto be broadcast on public radio. In early June 1966, Liu Shaoqi sent in Communist Party of China work teams to deal with the growing factionalism in the Guards, with work team leader Zhang Chunqiao attempting to keep the Guards under party control. Party-backed rebel groups attacked intellectuals, bourgeois elements in society, and the children of former landlords and capitalists, but Mao became concerned that the work teams were working against the Cultural Revolution. Mao sent Chen Boda, Jiang Qing, Kang Sheng, and others to join the Red Guards and combat the work teams, removing the work teams in July 1966 and condemning their "fifty days of White Terror".

Soon, Red Guards appeared in almost every school in China, and they made it their mission to attack the "Four Olds": old customs, old cultures, old habits, and old ideas. They desecrated religious sites, destroyed historical relics and artifacts, and attacked officials, intellectuals, and people with perceived bourgeois elements. Soon, the Red Guards became out-of-control, with Jiang Qing encouraging the Red Guards to crush the People's Liberation Army. Lin Biao allowed for the Red Guards to loot military barracks, and the Red Guards even clashed with factory workers and other, more conservative Red Guards.

By February 1967, the decision was made to remove the Red Guards from the Cultural Revolution. The PLA suppressed the more radical Red Guards groups in Sichuan, Anhui, Hunan, Fujian, and Hubei, and student radicalism was branded as "counterrevolutionary" and banned. From 1967 to 1968, the PLA brutally suppressed the Red Guards, carrying out unprecedented mass executions against the Red Guards in Guangxi. In the summer of 1968, the last of the Red Guards were defeated, and Mao tearfully announced the disbandment of the Red Guards in Beijing.